Sociology Experiments

My group performed two experiments to see how people react when we broke two types of social rules.

For the first experiment, we wore our underwear on the outside of our clothes in the middle of Downtown. We went early in the morning when the business people were walking to work. We hypothesized that some people would be offended and would verbally object to our appearance, and that we would attract a lot of weird looks. What we found was that a lot of people ignored us, and the rest gave us funny looks, and then pretended that we weren't there. Only a few openly recognized our presence. I believe this is partly because there can be a lot of strange people in Downtown, and because it is a lot easie to ignore someone that makes you uncomfortable than to confront the person.

For the second experiment, we painted signs that said things like "Smile," "You're alive," and "It's a beautiful day," and then held the signs up on busy street corners. We expected people to acknowledge us by smiling and waving. At the first corner, a lot of the people that were driving through did smile, wave and honk. At the second corner, however, where the light was red for most of the traffic, almost no one smiled. I believe that the farther away the people were from us (the less amount of "contact" they had with us), the more likely they felt comfortable enough to acknowledge us. But, if there couldn't get away from us, then they felt more comfortable ignoring us.